[TODO: minimal Planecrash summary]
-[TODO: Keltham's proposal]
+[TODO: summarize Keltham's interview]
... and that's the part that broke my suspension of disbelief in Keltham being a realistic portrayal of someone who grew up in dath ilan as it has been described to us, rather than being written by people who live in Berkeley in the current year who don't know how to think outside of their own culture's assumptions.
It makes sense that Keltham feels bad for the women of Orision, who seem so much less self-actualized than the women of his world. It makes sense that he wants to smash the patriarchy, and reform their sexist customs about education and property.
-But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be ["_the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402)—seems distinctively American. The idea the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a _principle_ (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ came a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain the principles first, and then dissect the example of military conscription (which is plausibly _the worst_ possible example the authors could have gone with).
+But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be ["_the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402)—seems distinctively American. The idea the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a _principle_ (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ came a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain the real principles first, and then dissect the example of military conscription (which is plausibly _the worst_ possible example the authors could have gone with).
The issue is that probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians _must_ condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, _of course_ you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't _stop being true_ when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling". Furthermore, there's no reason for the law to behave differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?!
But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're _not allowed to notice_ someone's race or sex. If there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative exent. Again, this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian reasoning, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
-If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree just because orcs are stronger than other races _on average_, because it could easily be the case that this _particular_ orc is less suited to the task than other party members.
+If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree, just because orcs are stronger than other races _on average_, because it could easily be the case that this _particular_ orc is less suited to the task than other party members.
-But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about _is also merely statistical_. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that a person's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just _on average_: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 12 person.
+But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about _is also merely statistical_. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that people's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just _on average_: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 14 person. _Mathematically_, it's the same issue.
-If you take probability and expected utility seriously—and everything we've been told about dath ilan says that that's what their Civilization is _all about_—then the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about me just because I'm _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
+We don't typically _think_ of it as the same issue here in America on Earth. People do sometimes complain about inappropriate reliance on "individual trait" proxies: that holding a college degree isn't the same thing as being educated, that IQ is not intelligence, that job interviews aren't the same thing as job performance, but the objection doesn't pack the same moral force in our culture:
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+oftentimes, the objection to
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+[
+
+[](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts)
-As far as principles are concerned, anyway. But pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful _heuristic_?
-It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially most jobs in an industrialized Society like dath ilan—"always test the individual's aptitude, never use sex as a proxy" is a fine rule, because most jobs primarily rely on human general intelligence: there was no _dentistry_ in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and thus there's no reason why women or men should make better dentists.
+]
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+But if you take probability and expected utility seriously—and everything we've been told about dath ilan says that that's what their Civilization is _all about_—then the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about me just because I'm _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
+
+[TODO: we talk about Keltham being different "because" he's a dath ilani]
+
+As far as principles are concerned, anyway. But pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful _heuristic_?
-But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because—as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about—there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
+It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially most jobs in an industrialized Society like dath ilan—"always test the individual's aptitude, never use sex as a proxy" is a fine rule, because most jobs primarily rely on human general intelligence: there was no _dentistry_ in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and thus there's no reason why women or men should make better dentists. In domains where sex differences are small, using sex as a proxy would just be _dumb_, not _unjust_.
-Men's bodies are built for war. Men's _emotions_ are built for war. [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding 94.5% of women.
+But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because, well, as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about ... there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Men's bodies are built for war. Men's _emotions_ are built for war. [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding 94.5% of women.
-Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful Society that [screened off its history](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? (We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apprent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism, which is [slower to evolve than monomorphic traits, anyway](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf).)
+Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful Society that [screened off its history](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apparent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism (which is [slower to evolve than monomorphic traits, anyway](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf)). We're told that [ordinary dath ilani are good at reasoning about effect sizes](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1783037#reply-1783037).
-But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff,
+But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate?
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